Garden RRwy
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I started my Garden Railway back in 2002. It’s come a long way since then. It’s been ruined a couple of times by flooding from the highway after the city did a large amount of building near us causing us to have severe runoff through our yard. I’ve since built a stone retaining wall to stop it after it badly washed it out last year. Here are some photos of it’s progress.
This photo and the one below are as I started laying track and the first go at my pond which has a pre-pond with 2 streams. I built the bridges out of red cedar and 2 years ago had to replace them with better built ones.
The bents are all scratch built out of red cedar as well. They are still all original.
This shows the loop in progress with some landscaping now. You can also see to the top left where we were clearing out and flattening for another loop.
This shows the progress of the new loop. This loop of track gets the most use because only a very small portion where it joins the oldest loop ever gets flooded out so doesn’t need as much repair.
The pond in 2003 and landscaping taking shape.
The pond in 2004. It got a redo this year. As you could see in the other photos you could always see alot of the liner. The railway is built on a slope. I built up the lower edge of the pond and also the streams so it evened it out and gave it a much more natural appearance.
In 2004 I also got into building concrete looking roads. Turned out rather well I thought. Followed the directions from an article in Garden Railways magazine.
Now we skip ahead to 2007. I acquired some real railroad crossing cross bucks from a friend and restored them and hung them near the railroad on an old wash line pole that had always been there. You can see the landscaping for the newer loop is really coming along too.
I had started taking photos of my engines in the snow for Christmas cards. This was my 2007 photo of my live steam Shay engine after a nice snow we had.
This was the basic photo for my 2008 card. It’s of my live steam Mimi engine.
This is the railway in 2010. Everything is growing in nicely. That’s vinca flowering up near the foreground.
One side of the newer loop with lots of landscaping coming in. I use small boxwoods for trees. There are also some cedars in the railroad that i wanted to keep small but are really becoming too large and should probably be cut out soon.
The other side of the newer loop with my Aristocraft engine running around on a spring day.
Showing off my metal gas station that I had bought at a show the winter before. I painted it and put the roof on.
Another photo showing the railroad in 2010. Not long after this we had another flooding rain that ruined a good portion of the roadbed for the track on a good share of the 2 oldest loops. I have since built the stone wall and am currently repairing the roadbed to run again on these loops.
